Re: Two naive questions

[Stephen Carrier <carrier@berkeley.edu>]

On Fri, Apr 17, 2020 at 12:44:30PM -0600, Brian Inglis wrote:
> On 2020-04-17 12:16, Andrey Repin wrote:
> > Greetings, Stephen Carrier!
> >> I remember having had the same confusion the first few times I initiated
> >> threads.
> 
> > When you start a new thread, do not reply to existing threads.
> > It's that simple.
> 
> Indeed - proper mail and news readers use References not Subject headers for
> threading when available, so your new topic will be lost under an old thread.

I think the OP's first question was asking how to effectively join
an existing thread when one is browsing the recent archives and not
subscribed to the list.

Joining the list after seeing a question one would like to answer
doesn't help, because the message you would like to respond to has
already gone by.

I think a good solution would be to get the message number from the web
archive and request that a particular message be sent to you.  Then you
could respond to that message and join the thread properly.

However, there doesn't seem to be a way to do that.  I used to be notified
how to retrieve messages I had missed (due to bouncing) but the method
did not work.  Furthermore, the mailman faq doesn't mention any way to
do this.

Stephen